TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092589/09258900.043

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                                                                                NATION, Page 26

Last Gasp for the Everglades


A surprise lawsuit may keep Florida's wetlands from choking on
pollution

By James Carney


    Once it was a forbidding wilderness of marshland and saw
grass that had to be drained and tamed before southern Florida
could realize its rich potential. Today the Everglades -- what
is left of it -- is surrounded by an urban sprawl of 4.5 million
people. Thriving sugarcane farms carved out of its northern
reaches drain pollutants into its water; Air Force jets boom
over its skies. The 1.4 million-acre Everglades National Park,
created in 1947, has become an endangered relic in the nation's
fourth most populous state. "Make no mistake," says outgoing
park superintendent Michael Finley, "the Everglades is dying."

    But not without a fight. Last fall, while candidate George
Bush was proclaiming himself an environmentalist, the Republican
U.S. Attorney in Miami sued the state of Florida for breaking
its own laws by pumping pollutants onto federal lands. State
officials, including Republican Governor Bob Martinez, were
stunned. Florida's farmers, who harvest nearly half the cane
sugar produced in the U.S. and contribute $2 billion a year to
the state economy, cried foul. In the past month the battle
intensified when the South Florida Water Management District,
the main defendant in the suit, proposed a new pollution-control
plan aimed at persuading U.S. Attorney Dexter Lehtinen to back
off. Lehtinen's reply: "We are going forward with the litigation
aggressively." The battle may drag on for years and end up as
the most expensive environmental lawsuit ever.

    If successful, the suit could be a landmark for national
parks trying to reach outside their boundaries to protect their
ecosystems. The "river of grass," as the Everglades was named
by naturalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, is one of the largest
wetlands systems in the world, and the most imperiled. Despite
the protection of the national park, the population of wading
birds has dropped from more than 2.5 million in the 1930s to
250,000. Thirteen Everglades animals are now endangered species.
Only about 30 Florida panthers remain, and in recent years
several have been killed on roads cutting through the area. Half
the original Everglades has been lost to development. Now the
biggest threat comes not from bulldozers but in nutrient-laden
runoff from sugarcane and vegetable farms that lie to the north,
between the Everglades and its chief source of water, Lake
Okeechobee.

    The Federal Government contends that Florida, despite
overwhelming demands on its limited natural resources, can
re-create the ecological balance necessary to keep the
Everglades alive. The water that replenishes the marshland once
spilled out of Lake Okeechobee in a shallow sheet 50 miles wide,
moving slowly south for 180 miles before emptying into Florida
Bay. But since the mid-1960s, the lake overflow has been
channeled through a massive flood-control project -- 1,400 miles
of canals and hydraulic pumps that can drain a field or rush
water to urban centers on command. Using computers, engineers
now try to mimic the natural flow into the park. If water levels
fluctuate even by a matter of inches, the ecology of the
Everglades can change radically. The same holds true if the
water is polluted.

    "There's nothing simple about trying to replicate nature,"
says Jim Webb, regional director of the Wilderness Society, "but
it has to be done." Florida's research shows that high levels
of phosphates and nitrates from farm runoff have transformed
more than 20,000 acres of Everglades saw grass into cattails.
These intruders, which thrive in high-nutrient water, suck the
oxygen from the marsh and suffocate aquatic life at the bottom
of the Everglades food chain. On shallow ponds and canals,
nutrient-fed algae grow so thick that they block the sun from
underwater plants. So far, most of the damage is confined to
Loxahatchee National Wildlife Preserve -- an Everglades habitat
abutting the farms -- and state conservation areas just north
of the national park. "It's like a cancer," says park
superintendent Finley, "and the cancer is moving south."

    U.S. Attorney Lehtinen, 43, grew up in Homestead, next to
the park, and was appointed federal prosecutor for South Florida
in June 1988, just when George Bush was campaigning for the
White House by promising "no net loss of wetlands." An Army
paratrooper who was badly wounded in the face in Viet Nam,
Lehtinen was a Democratic state legislator when he married a
Republican colleague, Ileana Ros; a year later, he switched to
the G.O.P. Last month Ileana Ros-Lehtinen won election to
Congress to fill Claude Pepper's seat. As a legislator, Lehtinen
earned a reputation as a hot-tempered, brainy conservative who
preferred taking on the Establishment to joining it.

    Critics of the Everglades suit charged -- correctly -- that
Lehtinen went to court without consulting either the Justice or
the Interior Department. Governor Martinez asked Attorney
General Dick Thornburgh to settle the suit or drop it. Last
December Lehtinen was summoned to Washington for a review of his
actions. It seemed the suit would be scrapped, but Lehtinen, by
agreeing to drop the most sweeping charges, returned with both
Justice and Interior on his side.

    "I didn't invent the environmental laws," says Lehtinen,
who denies that he is using the Everglades to promote his
political fortunes. "All we are asking is that the state of
Florida abide by what is already on the books." To comply,
however, the state will have to take on the powerful sugar
lobby. While not a defendant, sugar is clearly the suit's
target. For Florida to meet Lehtinen's water-purity standards,
farmers would have to convert at least 40,000 acres into marshes
to filter their pollution. Instead, the sugar industry has
questioned the U.S. Attorney's motives and disputed his
scientists' data. "The first question is, Which sugar mill will
you put out of business? Who will you put out of work?" asks
Andy Rackley, general manager of the Florida Sugar Cane League.
If growers are forced to give up land, he claims, the entire
industry could collapse.

    The water-management district is also angry. John Wodraska,
the district director, claims that the lawsuit is a nuisance
that only delays his staff from working on a plan to save the
Everglades. Moreover, the suit is costing a fortune in both
state and federal funds. Beyond the Justice Department's
considerable expenses, the water district's board has spent
$980,000 on legal fees and expects to dole out at least $175,000
more a month. Yet a majority of board members seem as
recalcitrant as the farmers. "If (Lehtinen) wants to fight,
let's go ahead," said board member Doran Jason at one meeting.
"There has to be a change," counters Nathaniel P. Reed, a former
top Interior official who once served on the water district's
board. "If sugar doesn't agree to the plan, the environmental
community will go to war."

    More is at stake than the future of a habitat for
alligators, wading birds and other swamp life. "This is not just
an argument between greedy farmers and anxious
environmentalists," says the Wilderness Society's Webb. "It's
a planning issue of fundamental proportions. It's the future of
South Florida." If the river of grass turns into a sea of
cattails, the water supply for coastal cities from West Palm
Beach to Miami could dry up, and a sunny subtropical paradise
could become a barren wasteland. Floridians are coming to
realize how much they too depend on the vast marshland that once
seemed so useless.